I will not dispute that my own degree provides me with resources, personal connections, and many cherished memories. What surprises me, however, is that some would consider my farming apprenticeships, which I view as an equally valuable and in some ways more practical educational experience, as mild exploitation. The upside of this popular misconception is that my friends often pick up the tab as, after all, I earn $600 a month, April to October. At the risk of losing my free drinks, however, I’d like to set the record straight.

Farming apprenticeships come in all manner of shapes and sizes—I know young farmers earning more than $1000 a month, not including the free room and board, and I know others who bring in $100 a month and share a bunk room in a trailer. What the good apprenticeships share is a sincere commitment on the part of the farmer to train the next generation of sustainable agrarians. These farmers believe in apprenticeships because they are themselves the products of a good one, or because they wish they had had such an experience, rather than the rough road of trial and error.

As an example, Don, the farmer at Caretaker Farm, where I work, apprenticed at Brookfield Farm under Dan Kaplan. Dan, in turn, apprenticed at Caretaker under the former owners, Sam and Elizabeth Smith. As an apprentice here, I am the beneficiary of the wisdom from three generations of excellent farmers.

These farmers are as much teachers as any professor—I receive feedback on my performance, assignments intended to improve my understanding or skills, and a patient ear for all of my questions. Truly, I ask a lot of questions. As the season winds to a close, we are taking time in our workday for weekly workshops on crop planning, cover cropping, CSA business management, and other topics. And all season long I’ve been provided with a home (the most lovely cabin since Thoreau’s Walden), all of my meals (groceries to supplement farm vegetables are provided, and we cook communally), and a setting that takes my breath away.
On top of all of that, I get paid. When I interned for a non-profit, which provided me with no housing, and no more food than free bagels on Fridays, I earned nothing. Farming seemed like quite the step up to me.

Too often, I think, non-farmers (or parents!) hear an apprentice salary and immediately calculate it into an hourly wage. Their conclusion, then, is that the employer farmers is getting one heck of a deal. When you consider, however, the labor invested each year in training an employee who will leave at then end of the season, the commitment to providing meaningful work, and the promise of an environment open to questions, I begin to wonder, “what kind of altruists are these people?”

This week CRAFT (yet another perk of my apprenticeship) visited Brookfield Farm, where manager Dan Kaplan explained his farm’s business plan and budget. Labor costs, his own and the apprentices’, make up a full 60% of his budget. “Apprentices are not cheap,” he noted with a laugh, “not if you treat them well.”

To be sure, exploitative apprenticeships exist. I have a friend who, finally tired of a lazy manager who taught him nothing and paid him little more, packed his car and left his apprenticeship mid-season. He was jaded and bitter and convinced that the idea of apprenticeship was all a sham.

But his experience is not the norm, I believe. Seek out an apprenticeship with the same critical eye with which others go college shopping. You’ll end up with a lot less debt, and with luck, a farm of your own some day.

As an apprentice farmer hoping to strike off on my own sometime soon, I’m pretty much always asking myself, “where should I farm?”  Should I return to Georgia, where I have family and friends?  Stay in Massachusetts, with its farmer-friendly state government and affordable health insurance?  I hear Pennsylvania has a great climate for tree fruit…  Recently I asked my current farm boss, Don, if he thought that the market near Williamstown could support another CSA farm.  “That depends on whom you ask,” he noted after some thought.  “There are farmers who hear of a new farm in the area and worry that the extra competition will hurt their own business; others view a new farm as an asset, an additional resource when you’ve got problems or questions, as well as another reason for townsfolk to buy local.”

His answer stuck with me.  And since I received it, I’ve begun to notice more and more the ways that the farmers I know support and assist one another.  There’s Cricket Creek Farm, the raw milk dairy down the road, which provides us with milk all winter long in return for a share of veggies come spring.   Or Hand Hollow Farm, a fledgling CSA 20 minutes in the opposite direction, founded by one of Don’s former apprentices (we call her the Prodigy Farmer).  With Don’s help, she spent her spare time in the fall of her apprenticeship planning the following spring on her own farm, and she hasn’t looked back since.

I saw this spirit of mutual support more clearly than ever on Monday, when I and about 30 other apprentices visited Indian Line Farm for one of our bimonthly lectures and tours through the CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training) program.  Indian Line is a farm with a story, by virtue of its having been the first CSA farm in the country.  In between that founding in 1985 and the present day, the farm passed through several manifestations before settling into the capable hands of its present farmer, Elizabeth Keen.

Elizabeth and her husband Al had only apprenticed for one year when the opportunity to take on Indian Line presented itself for them in 1997.  With only a single shared apprenticeship between the two of them, their learning curve was steep, as they related to us.  So steep, in fact, that for Elizabeth’s second and third seasons at Indian Line, she took on off-farm work in the mornings—working for Martin Stosiek of Markristo Farm down the road. After two seasons of farming in double-time, Elizabeth made Indian Line her single focus, though the close ties between Indian Line and Markristo remain strong.

As the tour led us into the basement of the barn, Elizabeth spoke to us about her decision to opt out of the USDA organic certification process.  While USDA certification can certainly be a boon to supermarket consumers, many of the farmers I know consider the associated paperwork and fees a headache not worth the cache of the organic label.  Indian Line concurred with this perspective, but had sought a way to convey to customers at market the sustainability of their growing practices.  Their solution, to join the farmer-based non-profit “Certified Naturally Grown,” perfectly suited the thread of cooperation and farmer community that runs throughout their operation.

Certified Naturally Grown is grassroots alternative to the USDA, through which farmers audit one another for sustainable practices.  Certified Naturally Grown is neither costly (the program requests a donation of $50-150 annually, though the exact amount is left to an individual farmer’s discretion), nor overburdened with paperwork, thus allowing small farmers to devote their energies to farming, rather than to proving themselves to strangers via a mountain of forms.

Though a Certified Naturally Grown farm leaves less of a paper trail than a Certified Organic one, all CNG records are openly available online. Growers clearly state their growing practices and sign a statement that they have abided by all of the CNG regulations (which are essentially the same as certified organic).  So what’s the difference?  Besides price and time, the auditors are other farmers and are allowed offer advice as they walk the fields, talk to the grower, and evaluate the farm (USDA certifiers, on the other hand, are not allowed to offer any suggestions during an audit).  To avoid conflict of interest problems, you are not allowed to audit the farmer who audited you.  In addition, every year, CNG randomly selects farms for pesticide residue testing, at no cost to the farmer.

Could someone cheat this system?  CNG admits that “no one can ever really know what may or may not be happening on an isolated farm at 5AM on a Sunday morning,” but they believe that their combination of deterrents (random testing), community support (audits by other farmers), and a transparent, easily navigated process to certification create a system that is uniquely accessible to small farmers and informative for consumers.

From my perspective, probably the most striking example of farmer collaboration I see is the CRAFT program itself.  The exposure to varied farming models and practical agricultural information is priceless, but I imagine that the greatest benefits will only become visible over time.  Through CRAFT I’m interacting with 40 other apprentices, most of whom seem eager to grow their own farms as soon as they can scrounge together a few packs of seeds and a flat patch of earth.   We probably seem a motley crew–drinking from mason jars, traipsing uphill and down in thick rubber boots and manure-stained work pants—but we are a passionate crowd, full of questions, ideas, and dreams of good food.

Something there is about springtime that would, I think, bring hopeful thoughts to the most inveterate pessimist. There’s a reason Williams Wordsworth was driven to poetry by the sight of a field of daffodils–this season is intoxicating. Lately spring has settled upon Western Massachusetts like a landslide of life: our asparagus is exploding out of the soil, the covercrop of rye grass in our fallow middle field is blue-green and lush, and our seedlings reach higher every day. Our calves frolic, kicking up their heels and all but dancing, as we let them out each day onto new, green pasture. Frankly, I feel about the same each morning as I walk up the hill from my cabin and breath in the smell of sunrise.

At such a time, it seems only appropriate that our CRAFT visit this week was to Farmgirl Farm, a young CSA farm whose grower, Laura Meister, spoke to us about the challenges and successes of her farm’s first 5 years. Beforehand, as we stood in a circle and introduced our company of bright-eyed young apprentices, Laura asked us to state whether we hoped to start our own farm someday, and if so how soon. Suffice it to say that we are an ambitious bunch.

Laura came to Farmgirl Farm without such grand designs. She signed on for the farm’s first season as a partner to an old friend, whose dream it was to run a small CSA farm. The white lie that she was “just helping for a year” proved “the blindfold that you need for such a crazy thing,” Laura laughingly explained. By the end of the year, her friend had pulled out, due to health problems and personal reasons. But Laura remained, took an ag business class that winter, and came into her second season with even more passion than the first.

Driving up, Farmgirl Farm seems petite and unencumbered by the detritus that old farms collect (tractor implements, wood scraps, scavenged miscellany which might come in handy some day). The main fields all fit within a neat, flat rectangular parcel which is bordered by an invitingly clear tributary of the Green River. Part of the reason for this tidy appearance is Laura’s lack of heavy machinery. Though she is now growing on 3 acres, she has not yet purchased a tractor and instead hires friends’ machines for the rare big job or preps beds herself with a walk behind rototiller. Because her land is all leased and she’s not exactly rolling in cash, Laura has intentionally kept her farm lean. She has invested in the fertility of her soil, certainly, but almost everything else–from the greenhouse to the coolers to the irrigation system–can be disassembled and moved, should a better opportunity present itself. She leases another, unirrigated piece of land across the street, and from these two small spaces she feeds a 75-member CSA and assorted restaurant customers.

To young farmers such as ourselves, Laura’s model is something that finally feels attainable. Many of us are working on deeply rooted established farms (Caretaker, for instance, was one of the first CSA farms in the country). While such farms are fantastic learning environments, they don’t give us much of a sense of how a 25-year-old could ever operate her own farm business. I can’t afford Caretaker’s beautiful old barn or its 38 fertile acres. But with a little bit of blind insanity and a lot of hard work, I imagine I could do something like Farmgirl Farm. For example, Laura is a brilliant scavenger. She found the frame of her greenhouse standing skeletal in someone’s field one winter, sleuthed around for the owner, and bought many of the components for a fraction of their cost. Laura uses bartered CSA shares not only to pay her lease (there were, I kid you not, audible gasps when she revealed this fact), but also to secure legal services, chiropractic care, manure for her compost, and housing for her apprentices.

She gave us practical advice on irrigation systems, marketing, and the value of transplanting vs direct seeding your first year (weeds won’t be as likely to choke transplants compared to direct-seeded crops). But what I remember most clearly and have been mulling over since was her humbling and inspiring benediction that “there will never be a moment when you think you know enough.” Get out, she said, ask questions, find mentors. Just commit to giving it your best shot, and the rest will likely follow.

After a hot, sweaty introductory year of organic farming in Georgia, I decided to devote a second year to working as an apprentice farmer in Massachusetts.  Cooler weather was not my only reason for the migration; I wanted to be a CRAFT apprentice.  CRAFT (the Cooperative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training) is a loosely affiliated network of small sustainable farms , all of whom take on apprentices and send these young greenhorns on bi-weekly visits to other CRAFT farms for lectures, tours, and farmer networking.   Several CRAFT farmers were among the first sustainable growers in the country; Community Supported Agriculture was born here.  It is a fine place to be a student of farming.

Last weekend, we had our first CRAFT visit, to a farm I will not name specifically, out of respect for the farmers’ privacy.  Amidst a potluck of epic proportions and copious introductions we found time to tour the farm and ask all of our nerdy farmer questions about soil, horsepower, and sales.  This farm, though still very much a small family operation, has moved over the years towards greater specialization and scale in their veggies. Salad greens are a particular forte of theirs, as greens are well suited to the cool climate and are always in demand with local chefs.  When their daily harvests (of salad greens, mind you) began totally several hundred pounds, they recently invested in a stainless steel washing system with tanks and hoses and a little conveyor belt.  Tipping the scales at $30,000, this system was a big investment for them.

The washing station catalyzed a Q&A amongst apprentices and farmers that revealed a side of the current food safety debate that many Americans do not recognize or understand, and which, especially at this juncture, is of critical importance to the small organic producers that I work for and strive to someday become.

In short, the issue is largely a matter of scale.

You see, this fancy, efficient, very expensive washing station is now somewhat worrisome to our farmer, on account of a USDA certification program called GAP (Good Agricultural Practices).   At present, GAP is voluntary, though many wholesale distributors, especially groceries, require it of their producers.  Our host worried aloud that with recent food safety scares, his restaurant clients might soon feel pressure from their insurance agencies to source only from GAP-certified farms.  He had attended a recent USDA presentation of GAP, and let’s just say that he was none too thrilled at the prospect of an audit.

This is not to say that his operation is in any way unclean—the fields looked immaculate; they are certified organic; he and his family are efficient, careful farmers.

The problem is not the farm, but the regulations, which are designed based on the recommendations from the USDA “Guide to Minimize Microbial Food Safety Hazards for Fresh Fruits and Vegetables.” Participating farms must wade through a quagmire of steps-within-steps, drafting hazard plans and employee education programs, providing documentation that “crop production areas are monitored for the presence or signs of wild or domestic animals entering the land” and other such inane (and frankly unrealistic) rules are abided by.

The regulations prohibit domestic animals within 2 miles of any fruit or vegetable cultivation.  They strongly encourage approved “field sanitation facilities” with individual paper towels, hand sanitizer, and running water.  They take into account every conceivable risk (even that of the light bulbs on the tractor breaking and glass shards entering the spinach) and try to mitigate them.  All of that mitigation means several things.  One, it means that the farmer is spending inordinate amounts of time on a certification process rather than on his or her crops.  Two, it means that an independent certification agency is being paid (by the farmer) for 10-20 hours worth of work to double-check compliance.  A score of 80% or more earns certification.   Three, it means that sustainable, clean farming practices (such as intentionally encouraging a woodland farm border, for the beneficial animals and insects which this facilitates, or washing your lettuce with well water, rather than a hyper-chlorinated brew) are discouraged, because they do not fit the big ag model.

It does not necessarily mean your food is any safer.  Risk, by definition, is not something that can ever be fully eliminated.

Our host looked at his shiny new washing system and shook his head.  “Within two loads of greens, the water in there is contaminated,” he said ruefully.  I assumed I had misunderstood and raised my hand.  “And by contaminated, do you mean with dirt?” I asked.  He laughed yes, and we all shook our heads.  His options to clean the wash water?  He could add a certified organic washing additive to the water, hyper-chlorinate it, or possibly look into UV light purification.

This is not the future of food that I had envisioned for myself.

The problem with GAP, the problem with more pressing legislation like H.R. 875 and H.R. 759, is that they do not differentiate between our CRAFT farms and big agribusiness farms (or even industrial organic growers like Earthbound Farms).  When you move 5000 pounds of spinach in a day, maybe you do need bathrooms in your mammoth fields.  When your neighbor is a CAFO pig operation with an utterly foul manure lagoon, maybe you should put some space between them and the escarole.  But at the level where I’m working, and at which I fervently believe a healthy, safe food system can be a reality, these are not the issues.

The issues are farmer access to land, facilitating direct sales (where farmers, rather than middlemen, make a profit),  allowing farmers to farm rather than do paperwork.  Vote with your pocketbook; vote with your stomach, just please vote with respect for small farms.